


A Rotten Kind of Cold

by StarsInMyDamnEyes



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, Jaskier | Dandelion Needs a Hug, Jaskier | Dandelion Whump, Murder, POV Jaskier | Dandelion, Sad Ending, Whump, a vague whiff of plot (it is not expanded upon in the slightest), and blood, fairly graphic depictions of corpsey things, i am incredibly glad to see that that is a tag, no beta we die like stregobor fucking should have, sad boi is sad, some introspection, someone murdered someone oops, sorry - Freeform, this is just miserableness oops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24937690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarsInMyDamnEyes/pseuds/StarsInMyDamnEyes
Summary: There was so much blood. If evenJaskiercould determine that by smell, and he had no enhanced witcher senses to boast of, it was possibly worse than he thought.He was not much of an investigator, by any means, but he could at least guess that whatever had happened, it had happened recently enough. He’d give it a broad timeframe of any time between early that morning and one, maybe two weeks ago - he didn’t know how long this particular smell lingered - but it wasn’t something that had just happened, not when the stench of blood, blood,fuckingblood had permeated the apartment to far too great an extent for that to be the case.Gods, it smelled so overpoweringly of blood.Jaskier adjusted his grip on the dagger, holding it up - it was so pitifully obvious, his defensiveness, but it was always better safe than sorry - and stepped across the floor.His footsteps were light, lighter than he thought he could make them in his thick walking boots, as he tiptoed towards the door, the door through which the marks went, the door through which the blood was.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia & Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 35
Kudos: 47
Collections: The Witcher Flash Fic Challenge #002





	A Rotten Kind of Cold

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry

Jaskier arrived in Oxenfurt a week before he’d planned to, having made extremely good time across the Kaedweni border and through Redania. He’d thought he would be slower going - always had been, in the past - but he supposed it was one of the benefits of trailing around after a witcher, getting faster at walking. Either that, or he’d budgeted his time better, stopped for less breaks... Regardless, whatever he was doing to make his travels so much more efficient, he could undoubtably blame it on the fact that Geralt had him trailing after his horse wherever they went.

In hindsight, Jaskier should, perhaps, have invested in his own horse.

Oh well. There was no changing the past. Perhaps, though, for the spring...

Jaskier made his way through familiar cobbled streets, shops he knew like the back of his own hand that he’d frequented since his student days welcoming him home. And this was, for all intents and purposes, his home - Lettenhove was dead to him, and whilst travelling with Geralt was nice, was familiar, the strange little routine they’d had between the two of them wasn’t constant enough for Jaskier to attach himself to it like that.

Even so, he harboured a small hope that might some day change. Oxenfurt was home, yes, but it was stagnant and dull, and the novelty had worn off long ago.

He took a long route back to his shitty little apartment - and the reason it was shitty was a good one, seeing as he only really stayed in it during some winters, the winters when he decided he was able to stomach the humdrum life of Professor Pankratz, and taught at the university, so there wasn’t really an excuse for it to be much more than the bare minimum. Jaskier wasn’t one to waste his coin like that, not on a house that stayed empty vastly more often than not. He meandered, as he habitually did, through streets he knew like the back of his hand.

On the other hand, perhaps it would do better not to make adventuring by Geralt’s side his home. Home, wherever it was, always did end up getting so stagnant.

The smells of the city, ever-shifting and varying in intensity, followed him as he walked, walking boots that he’d embroidered himself - because fuck, did he get bored when Geralt so adamantly banned him from following on his hunts, and he saved coin he’d otherwise have wasted getting the damn things done professionally anyways - thudding dully on the cobbled roads.

Jaskier had never really given much thought to the roads before he took up travelling, but now, it was hard not to instinctively notice how recognisable the patterns in the cobbles were, how well he knew these particular arrangements of stone, compared to the completely forgettable roads he traipsed through on his travels with Geralt.

He wasn’t avoiding returning to his Oxenfurt home, not by any means - he simply disliked being cooped up, and he would have nothing to do if he returned, other than perhaps clean, but cleaning was very much a day-after-arriving activity, for when he was at least a little rested from his journey.

Besides, it was a cramped little place, with barely enough space for both him, his lute, the huge sheathes of parchment he’d no doubt accrue thanks to his teaching, and, perhaps most significantly, all of the books he’d pilfered from the academy’s great library and never quite had the heart to return.

(Jaskier found it hard to be sorry for his wanton thievery - the library had, after all, stolen most of them first... and anyways, he was doing Oxenfurt a great service preserving the books now that the academy was hesitantly letting the Cult of the Eternal Fire have a say in its running. The rumours of their penchant for burning books on topics they disliked were, admittedly, rumours, but excuse Jaskier if he didn’t go poking around in Novigrad to convince himself of the innocence of such a virulently hateful sect in any regard. But, regardless, the point still stood.)

The sun was dipping below the horizon, bathing the city streets in a dim orange glow, by the time Jaskier had finally deigned to make his way to his... charitably, it could be described as a _living space_ , a few small rooms situated above a quaint little soap-shop that he himself frequented whenever he was in the city.

It could be assumed that the scent of the various soaps would permeate the entire building most unbearably, but in truth, Jaskier’s living space was rather well insulated from the shop beneath it.

This was why, as he made his way up the stairs, he was able to catch the scent... Although perhaps, that was a tad too generous a term, given that _catching_ implied a certain level of elusiveness on part of the target, and deftness on that of the catcher.

The coppery tang of blood that hit him as soon as he darkened the threshold of his home hit him all at once, damn near stealing the breath from his lungs, what with how overpowering it was.

He would have been slightly more disgruntled about how the bloody smell would linger at the back of his throat for hours had he not had a more pertinent matter at hand to think about - because whatever the source of the blood in his little living space might have been had clearly spilt a fuckoff ridiculous amount of it.

Melitele’s soft and gracious _tits_ , had someone been bled to death in his home? That would be an excellent way to start off his winter, explaining to whoever the bloody hell was in charge of the safety of the damn city (Jaskier didn’t know, in all honesty; whenever he committed a crime, he ensured that he wasn’t _caught_ for it, and thus he’d hardly had reason to find out... That, and he simply couldn’t be arsed to check) that no sir, he had not, in fact, sir, murdered a man by letting all of his blood right in his own damn apartment. Sir. Because he wasn’t, as a matter of fact, _stupid_.

Tiptoeing cautiously, ever so cautiously forward, sliding his dagger from his boot as subtly as he could whilst standing - Jaskier wasn’t particularly a very careful man, but caution as a precaution in this particular situation felt rather apt - he entered the flat.

He’d thought the smell of blood had been overpowering at the door.

Never, in his life, had Jaskier been more incorrect.

The stench was overwhelming, hanging thick in the air, the metallic taste on his tongue choking him. He pushed down the urge to audibly gag. Dear gods. Whatever - _whoever_ , most likely, the apartment was too pristine for this to be anything but a premeditated murder - had died in here, it had... fuck being bled out, if there was any moisture left in the corpse at _all_ , Jaskier would be shocked. Or was this a symptom emblematic of the hypothesis that there were _multiple victims_?

Well, string him up on Novigrad’s walls with his own damn guts. Someone - someone pretty fucking vindictive, apparently - had committed bloody murder in his damn _home_.

The living room was, eerily enough, pristine. Jaskier’s books sat, dusty and undisturbed, on their shelves, and even the furniture, and every singly mildly-secure hidden safe he’d ever half-assed the building of was, judging by the months-worth of grime covering... well, everything in their near vicinity.

There was a clear path, marked out in the dust, where whoever was responsible for all the blood had dragged the unwilling donor of said blood into the room.

Likely, they’d been unconscious on arrival. How charming of the killer.

Right, right, as if _Jaskier_ had any room to talk there - he had, after all, had his fair share of less-than-honourable acts of grievous bodily harm that could feasibly be described as inelegant murders - but he’d never been _cruel_ about it. Really, did they have to do this in his home, and be so obnoxious about it?

There was so much blood. If even _Jaskier_ could determine that by smell, and he had no enhanced witcher senses to boast of, it was possibly worse than he thought.

He was not much of an investigator, by any means, but he could at least guess that whatever had happened, it had happened recently enough. He’d give it a broad timeframe of any time between early that morning and one, maybe two weeks ago - he didn’t know how long this particular smell lingered - but it wasn’t something that had just happened, not when the stench of blood, blood, _fucking_ blood had permeated the apartment to far too great an extent for that to be the case.

Gods, it smelled so overpoweringly of blood.

Jaskier adjusted his grip on the dagger, holding it up - it was so pitifully obvious, his defensiveness, but it was always better safe than sorry - and stepped across the floor.

His footsteps were light, lighter than he thought he could make them in his thick walking boots, as he tiptoed towards the door, the door through which the marks went, the door through which the blood was.

The damn place was only three rooms big, and the little kitchen opposite the bedroom, right on the other side of the living room, hadn’t been touched at all.

Jaskier pushed open the door, preparing himself for the sight of blood, blood seeping into his old bedsheets and covering the floor and the walls, splattered on the mirror, congealing on every knob and handle...

And it was.

It was everywhere.

And Jaskier didn’t notice it at _all_.

Not when.

Not when the body, displayed so delicately on his bed, arranged so carefully and precisely and _oh gods_ -

Not when the hands, tied back to the column with twine, should have been cold from the bite of the chill in the Blue Mountains, not _this_ , never this,

Not when the skin that had been slit and soaked in that awful, coppery blood was criss-crossed with such a familiar pattern of scars,

Not when the hair that clung fastidiously to that head that hung so limp and dead was so coarse and white,

When the unseeing eyes were slit-pupilled and yellow

When it was _Geralt_ -

Not when some fucking _bastard_ had put the daintiest little flower in his empty, unfeeling hands.

He should, Jaskier thought distantly, be on his knees and howling, getting his hands sticky with _Geralt’s blood_ , blood that was all over his room and blood that he knew would never _stop_ lingering at the back of his throat, he should be raging, he should be screaming, he should be _reacting_.

But he wasn’t.

Jaskier felt... hollow. Empty. Like he’d been untethered, and wasn’t _that_ ridiculous, because he was the one out of the fucking two of them that was _still fucking here_ \- But he sure as shit didn’t feel like it.

He didn’t feel like anything at all.

He should have. He damn well should have. Geralt was dead, his blood was congealing on Jaskier’s fucking walls and his corpse was left here, drained and lifeless, clearly for _some bloody purpose_ because there was no _way_ that this was a fucking coincidence, and Jaskier.

Jaskier just.

He was numb.

Where was the anguish? The righteous fury? The sobbing grief that Geralt fucking _deserved_? He’d said, once, that nobody would mourn a witcher, least of all him, and Jaskier had scoffed at the very notion.

And yet.

Here the were.

Here he was.

Listless.

Jaskier knelt, and he would have been thinking about who would do this, and why, and _how_ , but that would assume that he was thinking at _all_ , and he wasn’t. He couldn’t.

Jaskier knelt, and he knelt there for a damn long time, half meeting Geralt’s dead eyes with his own, and half not daring to now that the light had gone out from behind them.

He was submerged, as if in icy cold water, and he couldn’t break the surface even long enough to shed a tear, not when everything was so muffled and muted, when he could barely move a muscle. He was, in a word, drowning.

Geralt was - gods, Geralt was dead.

It had only been three weeks ago, when they’d parted, Geralt headed for Kaedwen and the Blue Mountains (to Kaer Morhen, though he’d never told Jaskier that; he hadn’t had to, because he’d studied a fair bit of history, and one, when added to one, did generally tend to make two. What would a witcher want in a mountain range in winter, if not a witcher keep?) and it felt both like yesterday and forever ago.

Geralt had hummed and grunted and swore like it was any other day, and Jaskier had - as he was wont to - irritated him. He didn’t know if Geralt knew, and now he’d _never_ know, that Jaskier hadn’t wanted to part with him for the winter, not when Oxenfurt was so dull and lonely, and Geralt was slightly less dull and a whole lot more lonely and in possession of a veritable ocean’s worth of Jaskier’s regard, which was far more, by a large margin, really, than the few cupfuls he afforded Oxenfurt, the city that had long since lost its appeal.

And look where that had fucking gotten them.

The medallion hung limply around Geralt’s neck.

It looked so _wrong_ on him, like it was weighing down Geralt’s neck, bent towards the floor, suffocating him (he was already dead). Not like it had three weeks ago, three _fucking_ weeks ago, when he’d worn it with such a quiet dignity, like how it was _supposed_ to be worn.

Jaskier idly thought that perhaps he should have been there. Stayed with Geralt.

Maybe a bard wouldn’t have been able to do much against an assassin poised to take out a witcher.

Then again, maybe that was the point.

Jaskier’s trembling, limp hands were sticky, of course they were sticky - it must have been hell to bleed a witcher dry, and the dark, congealing blood on the floor that he’d fallen to was proof enough of that, and he way dimly aware that the lump in his throat was accompanied by the stinging salt of tears on his eyelashes.

He was crying.

Thank the fucking gods. He at least owed Geralt that much, though it was a fat lot of good that his tears would do, not when Geralt was far beyond anything that Jaskier could, feasibly or unfeasibly, do for him.

What had Jaskier ever done for him?

He’d gotten him killed. It was no coincidence, that Geralt was _here_ , in _Jaskier’s_ home, so clearly a message, that the bard had fucking well done _something_ wrong by standing at his side and singing his stupid songs.

A flower, in Geralt’s cold, dead, hands.

When really, it should have been Jaskier’s.

**Author's Note:**

> Again. Sorry.


End file.
